Wohoo! Interestingly Steam had greenlit our PC game Battlestation: Humanity’s Last Hope. We weren’t in the top 100, but as we have read before it’s not just about the votes. This is a good thing, since we too were offered “fake” votes. One such offer was from a group with hundreds of people, stating that they could offer votes in exchange for a promise to provide them with free Steam codes once the game has launched.

3 years ago we started a mobile game company together with my brother. We took inspiration from our childhood and started making a game, with dog characters flying around in air planes and battling it out in the sky. We also wanted to do something different, and so we implemented features in the game that would support charity by donating a sum of our proceeds.

We worked hard for 9 months only to see the game be a complete flop. It was a bit devastating after putting so much effort into it but we didn’t want to give up, so we started on a new one. A new dog game! This time it would be much more simple and better, or so we thought. We got a good amount of downloads to it but it failed to monetize much at all…

Ever wondered how getting a game featured by Google impacts downloads on your Android game? We’ve just released our newest game: Battlestation: First Contact on Google Play. Last Thursday it was featured by Google and now I want to take you with us on the ride! We’ve had a featuring from Google before but this time it is during the first month of the launch, this should have a big impact since rising on the lists of “Top new free” is much easier than rising on the main list of “Top free”.

I’m an indie game developer and let me tell you why it’s so great. Looking back now normal life was always boring to me, it was never enough. Sure, I found some things fascinating, but I always wanted more. That’s why I escaped to my imagination.

When I was young I would climb small hills on cold winter days, fight the ice and try to make it to the top. I was conquering Mount Everest humming some epic tune to myself as I struggled on. I would hear my friend talk to another boy and say: “Yeah, he always does that”.

Going up up up! And it’s gone. Here’s the second part of my report about how a Google featuring impacts the downloads of a casual game. Scroll down a bit if you want to read part 1 first.

There is the curve in all its glory. It’s clear where the featuring started and where it ended. Before we got the notion of a featuring taking place we had around 30 downloads/day. Yes, 30. The featuring process seemed to be in a form of roll out, with Google adding places bit by bit and then removing them towards the end. First places lifted our downloads to around 300, and then from there we jumped to around 5000-8000 installs/day.

So some time has passed and our game Ace Tales has been featured by Google. We didn’t know quite what to expect, but hoped of course that we would reach huge amount of downloads. Let’s see what has happened so far:

One of the first channels your eyes fixate towards as an indie developer regarding marketing are the Android gadgets and apps centered websites. Once you have sent out 100 e-mails and got responses from 5 asking for money, your mood might be a little deflated. Is this how the mobile game marketing world works? You bet! If a website is starting to get a lot of traffic they will quickly be looking for ways to monetize. We have had a couple of successes of getting our game featured without paying, but it is hard work.

So which websites are the ones to concentrate on, and which ones are even worth paying for? Here are our experiences with our free2play games:

Seeing a lot of followers on an account on Twitter, or likes on Facebook might let you believe that this particular channel could bring in a lot of downloads if you just got your post in there. Our experiences with the mobile game Ace Tales tell a different story. Here are some statistics:

Twitter:

Retweeted by a random account with over 400 000 followers – Result: Around 0 downloads.

Retweeted by an let’s play account with 38 000 followers – Result: Around 0 downloads.

A lot of retweets by accounts having followers ranging from 1000 – 10 000. These didn’t bring in any downloads either.

When I say “around 0 downloads”, I mean that we saw no notable fluctuation in our daily download counts, which was around 200.